Hydrogen energy storage is a key scientific problem for large-scale commercial application of hydrogen energy. Due to high hydrogen storage capacity, abundant resource, inexpensiveness, environment-friendly and the like, MgH2 finds a promising application. However, the high thermodynamic stability and slow hydrogen absorption and desorption kinetics property of MgH2 have greatly limited its use in the practical application. In recent years, a variety of methods have been used by the researchers to overcome these disadvantages, such as mechanical alloying, doping catalyst, hydrogen combustion method, rapid cooling, and the like. Although the magnesium-based material has greatly improved in the hydrogen absorption property, the improvement of the hydrogen desorption property is not significant, the hydrogen desorption temperature is higher than 250-300° C. and the hydrogen desorption kinetics property is slow.
The hydrogen desorption temperature can be reduced by adding rare earth and transition metal in the magnesium-based material. The alloy prepared by a conventional melting process has a high crystal particle size, and the transition metal thereof is prone to agglomeration, so that the alloy has a low reversible hydrogen storage capacity, high hydrogen desorption temperature, and low hydrogen absorption and desorption cycle life. At the same time, the hydrogen absorption and desorption properties of the magnesium-based alloy can also be significantly improved by introducing oxides such as V2O5, Nb2O5, TiO2, CeO2, and the like, mainly due to the catalytic effect of the oxide on the magnesium-based material. The traditional oxide addition mostly adopts the mechanical addition process, which requires a complex apparatus, and consumes a large amount of energy and time, and due to addition in a mechanical way, the distribution of these additives in the magnesium-based alloy is not very uniform, with a high size, which restricts the catalytic effect of the same on the magnesium-based material.